Sexy Emma

The character of Emma Frost is always a conflicted one. She began in The X-Men as the villainous White Queen, leader of The Hellfire Club, a jaded hedonist whose agenda was at odds both with Professor X's X-Men and his Institute, and with Magneto's dreams of mutant dominance.

Over the years, all of the leaders' characters has grown, developed and matured. Magneto, Erik Lehnsherr, turns out to be a Holocaust survivor who knows what human hate tastes like, and for whom the words "Never Again" are branded in his heart as permanently as the number on his forearm; and Charles Xavier's shown his own dark side and revealed the inevitable truth that a master telepath often cannot help but ultimately end up manipulating those around him, whose secrets are always laid out before him.

Pretty soon, any telepath will discover that people around him are acting as if they have secrets to hide because they /do/ have secrets to hide. And for Emma Frost, this led to the major change in her personality, the point where she began to show a depth we had never expected.

Her secret was that she was in love with Cyclops.

She must have fallen in love with Scott Summers the moment she first saw him in action. His vulnerability, capacity for crippling self-doubt and guilt manifesting in the brain damage that rendered him incapable of controlling his eye-beams was clearly laid out before her. She is a telepath. How could she not see it?

And clearly his other virtues - his true belief in his X-Men and the vision of mutants and humans being able to accept one another, his grief over losing Jean Grey - were equally laid bare before her telepath senses.

And seeing all this vulnerability, she must have seen something that was a reflection of something within her. The vulnerability, the weakness in her diamond form, her own crystalline flaw that turned out to be her greatest strength - the strength that had her sheltering and giving aid to her own gay son where her own brutish father would have had him institutionalised.

Her own guilt at betraying her best friends so she could be promoted to White Queen, and the callousness with which she witnessed their murder at the hands of Sebastian Shaw. The ease with which she allowed her own pride and desire for power to override her moral core.

Which brings us to this image, above, and its depiction of the modern Emma Frost; a character who, while aware of her exceptional mutant abilities - her telepathy, her diamond form secondary mutation - remains still an internally vulnerable woman. The casual insouciance of her candid pose, caught in the act of disrobing, in the moment before releasing her clothes to the ground, and the curiosity expressed in that calm face, strongly reveals her character - not some Jezebel, some seducing Salome or rampant Lilith - like lust demon, but just a woman.

A woman who has been in a demeaning place, and has been demeaned, and who knows that she has a mission to make sure never to be demeaned again. A woman who has a passion to make sure that those she cares about and loves never have to go through what she went through. A woman who has taken the positive parts from her negative life with her, leaving behind the baggage of imposed guilt, shame and the denigrations of those she'd once had to dance for, in order to gain the power to rule over them.

A woman who saw the vitriolic heart of the very dark side of humanity, and refused to let that harden the one part of her body that remains uncrystallised, unfossilised, to this day - her heart, her soul.

If the X-Men were a documentary rather than entertainment, I'd get behind Scott Summers' cause, as long as Emma Frost were beside him. The Emma Frost whose passions well this artist yet, which yet survive, stamped in this beautiful work.

A most exquisite piece.